The Camberwell Beauty Read online

  I put down my glass and got out of the pub fast without finishing it. Not because I was afraid of Pliny. Oh no! I drove straight back to Pliny’s shop. I rang the bell. The drum started beating a few taps and then a window upstairs opened.

  ‘What do you want?’ said Isabel in a whisper.

  ‘I want to see you. Open the door.’

  ‘It’s locked.’

  ‘Get the key.’

  She considered me for a long time.

  ‘I haven’t got one,’ she said, still in a low voice, so hard to hear that she had to say it twice. ‘Where have you been?’ she said.

  We stared at each other’s white faces in the dark. She had missed me!

  ‘You’ve got a key. You must have,’ I said. ‘Somewhere. What about the back door?’

  She leaned on the window, her arms on the sill. She was studying my clothes.

  ‘I have something for you,’ I said. This changed her. She leaned forward trying to see more of me in the dark. She was curious. Today I understand what I did not understand then; she was looking me over minutely, inch by inch-what she could see of me in the sodium light of the street lamp-not because I was strange or unusual—but because I was not. She had been shut up either alone or with Pliny without seeing another soul for so long. He was treating her like one of his collector’s pieces, like the Meissen August had said he kept hidden upstairs. She closed the window. I stood there wretched and impatient. I went down the Goods Entrance ready to kick the side door down, break a window, climb in somehow. The side door had no letter box or glass panes, no handle even. I stood in front of it and suddenly it was opened. She was standing there.

  ‘You’re not locked in,’ I said.

  She was holding a key.

  ‘I found it,’ she said.

  I saw she was telling a lie.

  ‘Just now?’

  ‘No. I know where he hides it,’ she said lowering her frank eyes.

  It was a heavy key with an old piece of frayed used-up string on it.

  ‘Mr. Pliny does not like me to show people things/ she said. ‘He has gone to see his sister in Brixton. She is very ill. I can’t show you anything.’

  She recited these words as if she had learned them by heart. It was wonderful to stand so near to her in the dark.

  ‘Can I come in?’ I said.

  ‘What do you want?’ she said cautiously.

  ‘You,’ I said.

  She raised her chin.

  ‘Are you one of August’s men?’ she said.

  ‘You know I’m not. I haven’t seen August for years.’

  ‘Mr. Pliny says you are. He said I was never to speak to you again. August was horrible.’

  ‘The last I heard he was in prison.’

  ‘Yes,» she said. ‘He steals.’

  This seemed to please her; she forgave him that easily.

  Then she put her head out of the doorway as if to see if August were waiting behind me.

  ‘He does something else, too she said.

  I remembered the violent quarrel between August and poor Mrs. Price when she was drunk in Salisbury – the quarrel about Isabel.

  ‘You ran away/ I said.

  She shook her head.

  ‘I didn’t run away. Mr. Pliny fetched me,’ she said and nodded primly, ‘in his car. I told you.’

  Then she said: ‘Where is the present you were bringing me?’

  ‘It isn’t a present/ I said. ‘It’s the little figure I bought from you. You didn’t charge me enough. Let me in. I want to explain.’

  I couldn’t bring myself to tell her that I had taken advantage of her ignorance, so I said:

  ‘I found out afterwards that it was worth much more than I paid you. I want to give it back to you.’

  She gave a small jump towards me. Oh please, please,’ she said and took me by the hand. ‘Where is it?’

  ‘Let me come in,’ I said, ‘and I will tell you. I haven’t got it with me. I’ll bring it tomorrow, no not tomorrow, Monday.’

  ‘Oh. Please,’ she pleaded. ‘Mr. Pliny was so angry with me for selling it. He’d never been angry with me before. It was terrible. It was awful.’

  It had never occurred to me that Pliny would even know she had sold the piece; but now, I remembered the passions of the trade and the stored up lust that seems to pass between things and men like Pliny. He wouldn’t forgive. He would be savage.

  ‘Did he do something to you? He didn’t hit you, did he?’

  Isabel did not answer.

  ‘What did he do?’

  I remembered how frantic Pliny had been and how violent he had sounded, when he told me to get out of his shop.

  ‘He cried,’ she said. ‘He cried and he cried. He went down on his knees and he would not stop crying. I was wicked to sell it. I am the most precious thing he has. Please bring it. It will make him better.’

  ‘Is he still angry?’

  ‘It has made him ill,’ she said.

  ‘Let me come in,’ I said.

  ‘Will you promise?’

  ‘I swear I’ll bring it,’ I said.

  ‘For a minute,’ she said, ‘but not in the shop.’

  I followed her down a dark passage into the store and was so close that I could smell her hair.

  Pliny crying! At first I took this to be one of Isabel’s fancies. Then I thought of tall, clumsy, servant-like Pliny, expert at sales with his long-nosed face pouring out water like a pump, repentant, remorseful, agonized like an animal, to a pretty girl. Why? Just because she had sold something? Isabel loved to sell things. He must have had some other reason. I remembered Castle of Westbury’s story. What had he done to the girl? Only a cruel man could have gone in for such an orgy of self-love. He had the long face on which tears would be a blackmail. He would be like a horse crying because it had lost a race.

  Yet those tears were memorable to Isabel and she so firmly called him ‘Mr. Pliny’. In bed, did she still call him ‘Mr. Pliny’? I have often thought since that she did; it would have given her a power-perhaps cowed him.

  At night the cold white-washed store-room was silent under the light of its single bulb and the place was mostly in shadow, only the tops of stacked furniture stood out in the yellow light, some of them like buildings. The foundations of the stacks were tables or chests, desks on which chairs or small cabinets were piled. We walked down alleys between the stacks. It was like walking through a dead, silent city, abandoned by everyone who once lived there. There was the sour smell of upholstery; in one part there was a sort of plaza where two large dining tables stood with their chairs set around and a pile of dessert plates on them. Isabel was walking confidently. She stopped by a dressing-table with a mirror on it next to a group of wardrobes and turning round to face it, she said proudly:

  ‘Mr. Pliny gave it all to me. And the shop.’

  ‘All of this?’

  ‘When he stopped crying,’ she said.

  And then she turned about and we faced the wardrobes. There were six or seven, one in rosewood and an ugly yellow one and they were so arranged here that they made a sort of alcove or room. The wardrobe at the corner of the alley was very heavy and leaned so that its doors were open in a manner of such empty hopelessness, showing its empty shelves, that it made me uneasy. Someone might have just taken his clothes from it in a hurry, perhaps that very minute, and gone off. He might be watching us. It was the wardrobe with the squeaking door which I had seen the customer open while the woman whom I had thought to be Mrs. Pliny stood by. Each piece of furniture seemed to watch-even the small things, like an umbrella stand or a tray left on a table. Isabel walked into the alcove and there was a greeny-grey sofa with a screwed up paper bag of toffees on it and on the floor beside it I saw, of all things, the lancer’s helmet and the side drum and the bugle. The yellow light scarcely lit this corner.

  ‘There’s your drum,’ I said.

  ‘This is my house,’ she said, gaily now. ‘Do you like it? When Mr. Pliny is away I come here in case
August’s men come.… ’

  She looked at me doubtfully when she mentioned that name again.

  ‘And you beat the drum to drive them away?’ I said. ‘Yes,’ she said stoutly.

  I could not make out whether she was playing the artless child or not, yet she was a woman of twenty-five at least. I was bewildered.

  ‘You are frightened here on your own, aren’t you?’

  ‘No I am not. It’s nice.’

  Then she said very firmly:

  ‘You will come here on Monday and give me the box back?’

  I said: ‘I will if you’ll let me kiss you. I love you, Isabel.’

  ‘Mr. Pliny loves me too,’ she said.

  ‘Isab … ‘I said. That did move her.

  I put my arm round her waist and she let me draw her to me. It was strange to hold her because I could feel her ribs, but her body was so limp and feeble that, loving her as I did, I was shocked and pulled her tightly against me. She turned her head weakly so that I could only kiss her cheek and see only one of her eyes and I could not make out whether she was enticing me, simply curious about my embrace or drooping in it without heart.

  ‘You are one of August’s men,’ she said getting away from me. ‘He used to try and get into my bed. After that I locked my door.’

  ‘Isabel,’ I said. ‘I am in love with you. I think you love me. Why did you marry a horrible old man like Pliny?’

  ‘Mr. Pliny is not horrible,’ she said. ‘I love him. He never comes to my room.’

  ‘Then he doesn’t love you,’ I said. ‘Leaving you locked up here. And you don’t love him.’

  She listened in the manner of someone wanting to please, waiting for me to stop.

  ‘He is not a real husband, a real lover,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, he is,’ she said proudly. ‘He takes my clothes off before I go to bed. He likes to look at me. I am the most precious thing he has.’

  ‘That isn’t love, Isabel,’ I said.

  ‘It is,’ she said with warmth. ‘You don’t love me. You cheated me. Mr. Pliny said so. And you don’t want to look at me. You don’t think I‘m precious.’

  I went to take her in my arms again and held her.

  ‘I love you. I want you. You are beautiful. I didn’t cheat you. Pliny is cheating you, not me,’ I said. ‘He is not with his sister. He’s in bed with a woman in Brixton. I saw them in a pub. Everyone knows it.’

  ‘No he is not. I know he is not. He doesn’t like it. He promised his mother,’ she said.

  The voice in which she said this was not her playful voice; the girl vanished and a woman had taken her place and not a distressed woman, not a contemptuous or a disappointed one.

  ‘He worships me,’ she said and in the squalid store of dead junk she seemed to be illumined by the simple knowledge of her own value and looked at my love as if it were nothing at all.

  I looked at the sofa and was so mad that I thought of grabbing her and pulling her down there. What made me hesitate was the crumpled bag of toffees on it. I was as nonplussed and, perhaps, as impotent as Pliny must have been. In that moment of hesitation she picked up her bugle and standing in the aisle, she blew it hard, her cheeks going out full and the noise and echoes seemed to make the shadows jump. I have never heard a bugle call that scared me so much. It killed my desire.

  ‘I told you not to come in,’ she said. ‘Go away.’

  And she walked into the aisle between the furniture, swinging her key to the door.

  ‘Come back,’ I said as I followed her.

  I saw her face in the dressing-table mirror we had passed before, then I saw my own face, red and sweating on the upper lip and my mouth helplessly open. And then in the mirror I saw another face following mine-Pliny’s. Pliny must have seen me in the pub.

  In that oblong frame of mahogany with its line of yellow inlay, Pliny’s head looked winged by his ears and he was coming at me, his head down, his mouth with its yellowing teeth open under the moustache and his eyes stained in the bad light. He looked like an animal. The mirror concentrated him and before I could do more than half turn he had jumped in a clumsy way at me and jammed one of my shoulders against a tall-boy.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he shouted.

  The shouts echoed over the store.

  ‘I warned you. I’ll get the police on you. You leave my wife alone. Get out. You thought you’d get her on her own and swindle her again.’

  I hated to touch a white-haired man but, in pain, I shoved him back hard. We were, as I have said, close to the wardrobe and he staggered back so far that he hit the shelves and the door swung towards him so that he was half out of my sight for a second. I kicked the door hard with my left foot and it swung to and hit him in the face. He jumped out with blood on his nose. But I had had time to topple the pile of little cane chairs into the alleyway between us. Isabel saw this and ran round the block of furniture and reached him and when I saw her she was standing with the bugle raised like a weapon in her hand to defend the old man from me. He was wiping his face. She looked triumphant.

  ‘Don’t you touch Mr. Pliny,’ she shouted at me. ‘He’s ill.’

  He was ill. He staggered. I pushed my way through the fallen chairs and I picked up one and said: ‘Pliny, sit down on this.’ Pliny with the bleeding face glared and she forced him to sit down. He was panting. And then a new voice joined us; the tobacconist came down the alley.

  ‘ I heard the bugle,’ he said. ‘Anything wrong? Oh Gawd, look at his face. What happened, Pliny? Mrs. Pliny, you all right?’ And then he saw me. All the native shadiness of the London streets, all the gossip of the neighbourhood came into his face.

  ‘I said to my wife,’ he said, ‘something’s wrong at Pliny’s.’

  ‘I came to offer Mr. Pliny a piece of Dresden,’ I said, ‘but he was out at Brixton seeing his sister, his wife said. He came back and thought I’d broken in and hit himself on the wardrobe.’

  ‘You oughtn’t to leave Mrs. Pliny alone with all this valuable stock, Mr. Pliny. Saturday night too,’ the tobacconist said.

  Tears had started rolling down Pliny’s cheeks very suddenly when I mentioned Brixton and he looked at me and the tobacconist in panic.

  ‘I’m not interested in Dresden,’ he managed to say.

  Isabel dabbed his face and sent the tobacconist for a glass of water.

  ‘No, dear, you’re not,’ said Isabel.

  And to me she said: ‘We’re not interested.’

  That was the end. I found myself walking in the street. How unreal people looked in the sodium light.

  The Diver

  In a Side street on the Right Bank of the Seine where the river divides at the Ile de la Cité, there is a yellow and red brick building shared by a firm of leather merchants. When I was twenty I worked there. The hours were long, the pay was low, and the place smelled of cigarettes and boots. I hated it. I had come to Paris to be a writer but my money had run out, and in this office I had to stick. How often I looked across the river, envying the free lives of the artists and writers on the other bank. Being English, I was the joke of the office. The sight of my fat pink innocent face and fair hair made everyone laugh; my accent was bad, for I could not pronounce a full ‘o’ worst of all, like a fool, I not only admitted I hadn’t got a mistress, but boasted about it. To the office boys this news was extravagant. It doubled them up. It was a favourite trick of theirs, and even of the salesman, a man called Claudel with whom I had to work, to call me to the street door at lunchtime and then, if any girl or woman passed, they would give me a punch and shout:

  ‘How much to sleep with this one? Twenty? Forty? A hundred?’ I put on a grin, but, to tell the truth, a sheet of glass seemed to come down between me and any female I saw.

  About one woman the lads did not play this game. She was a woman between thirty and forty I suppose, Mme. Chamson, who kept the menders and cleaners down the street. You could hear her heels as she came, half-running, to see Claudel, with jackets and trousers of
his on her arm. He had some arrangement with her for getting his suits cleaned and repaired on the cheap. In return—well, there was a lot of talk. She had sinfully tinted hair built up high over arching, exclaiming eyebrows, hard as varnish and when she got near our door there was always a joke coming out of the side of her mouth. She would bounce into the office in her tight navy blue skirt, call the boys and Claudel together, shake hands with them all, and tell them some tale which always ended, with a dirty glance around, in whispering. Then she stood back and shouted with laughter. I was never in this secret circle and if I happened to grin, she gave me a severe and offended look and marched out scowling. One day, when one of her tales was over, she called back from the door:

  ‘Standing all day in that gallery with all those naked women, he comes home done for, finished.’

  The office boys squeezed each other with pleasure. She was talking about her husband who was an attendant at the Louvre, a small moist-looking fellow whom we sometimes saw with her, a man fond of fishing, whose breath smelled of white wine. Because of her arrangement with Claudel, and her stories, she was a very respected woman.

  I did not like Mme. Chamson; she looked to me like some predatory bird; but I could not take my eyes off her pushing bosom and her crooked mouth. I was afraid of her tongue. She caught on quickly to the fact that I was the office joke, but when they told her on top of this I wanted to be a writer, any curiosity she had about me was finished. ‘I could tell him a tale,’ she said. For her I didn’t exist. She didn’t even bother to shake hands with me.

  Streets and avenues in Paris are named after writers; there are statues to poets, novelists and dramatists, making gestures to the birds; nursemaids and children in the gardens. How was it these men had become famous? How had they begun? For myself, it was impossible to begin. I walked about packed with stories, but when I sat in cafés or in my room with a pen in my hand and a bare sheet of paper before me, I could not touch it. I seemed to swell in the head, the chest, the arms and legs, as if I was trying to heave an enormous load on to the page and could not move. The portentous moment had not yet come. And there was another reason. The longer I worked in the leather trade and talked to the office boys, the typists there and Claudel, the more I acquired a double personality; when I left the office and walked to the Metro, I practised French to myself. In this bizarre language the stories inside me flared up, I was acting and speaking them as I walked, often in the subjunctive: but when I sat before my paper, the English language closed its sullen mouth.